Woke is about race

Analyses of the woke movement that ignore race differences cannot fully explain it.

Written by Bo Winegard.

The woke movement really doesn’t want us to talk about race differences in IQ. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the woke movement’s most ardent critics oblige. They will criticize the woke movement, will attack it, mock it, denigrate it, but they will not talk about race differences. This inevitably leads to an impoverished understanding of wokism, for attempting to understanding wokism without considering race differences is like trying to understand physics without considering gravity.

In a recent example, Michael Shermer wrote a piece about the causes of the rise of woke. While the piece is lucid and plausible as far as it goes, it ignores race differences—or collapses them unhelpfully into a more general category of blank-slate ideology without explicitly mentioning them. The result is a confused analysis constrained by the very taboo that gave rise to the woke movement.